Shedding deadweight

Over the past year, Brian has been slowly collecting shipping pallets and odd bits of lumber from various spots around town. He didn't have any particular use in mind for them, but he knew they could come in handy for projects like our DIY compost bin, so whenever he happened to spot a piece in good condition, he'd just grab it and stow it away in our shed. All these new acquisitions sat snuggled up against the top from our old patio table, which Brian had also squirreled away "just in case" after we replaced the patio set last summer. Since the shed isn't very big and already contained quite a lot of stuff, useful and otherwise, it gradually became harder and harder to get around in there.

So, Saturday morning, he decided it was time to haul out all that wood and "do something" with it. He hadn't actually figured out what he wanted to do with it, but he thought he'd retrieve it first and take it from there. But in order to haul out the wood, he had to first haul out all the other stuff in the shed that was blocking his path to it. And once he'd started doing that, he realized that some of the stuff in question was in pretty bad condition and really should be disposed of. So when I came down to join him, about 20 minutes after he'd gone out (saying vaguely that he'd "be outside"), I found the yard looking more or less like this and Brian in the process of breaking apart an old plastic trash barrel—which we'd somehow managed to get stuck inside another trash barrel—with his bare hands.  

Well, once I saw this project in progress, naturally I had to jump in. What started out as just a general notion of dealing with the wood pile turned into a full-scale clear-out and reorganization of the shed contents. Over the next few hours, we dragged out pretty much everything that was sitting on every horizontal surface in that shed—floor, table, shelves—and decided what was worth putting back and where it should go. (Since I'd come late to the party, I didn't manage to get a "before" picture of the shed in its cluttered state, but I took several of the "during" and "after.")

We kept the big pile of old birdseed bags that we use to haul bulk compost and mulch home from the Co-Op, but we discarded most of the smaller cat-food bags that were too small for this purpose. (We brought a few indoors to use as trash bags, and we kept a couple as material for tree bands to foil pests like squirrels and lanternflies.) We sorted out our tangled piles of rope and deer netting, removed the damaged ones, bundled the rest up neatly, and tucked them into one large bin together. We went through our huge collection of plant pots, removing any that were damaged and culling some of the ones in less useful sizes. (The remaining collection is still huge, but at least it's now been neatly sorted into stacks that won't fall over.) We tossed several items that had clearly ceased to be useful, such as torn gardening gloves and the aforementioned big trash barrel, which Brian divided into two large pieces so it could fit inside our even larger trash bin. And we swept off all the exposed surfaces, clearing away years' worth of accumulated dust, straw, and desiccated rat droppings (though, fortunately, no fresh ones).

Among the trash, we also found several items that were possibly useful to someone, just not to us. These included:

• A set of very nice garden tools (a fork and two trowels) that were still sitting unused in their original box. We'd received them as a gift and never used them because we were so used to our old ones. Fortunately, these quickly found a new home on Freecycle. 
• A grill basket too large to fit on our grill and a couple of other grilling tools (a long spatula and fork) that we'd picked up somewhere and never used. These will go on Freecycle as soon as we've cleaned some of the rust off them.
• The pan and funnel we used for changing the oil in our old Honda, which we haven't used in over 14 years. (The oil pan on our "new" car, bought in 2011, proved much harder to access, and we decided it wasn't worth the hassle.) These will also go on Freecycle.
• An old trowel that's not as nice as our three other trowels. This went out by the curb with our discarded plant pots, where it was quickly snapped up.
• An  unidentified electrical device that plugs into a car charger. Brian thought it was meant for defrosting a cold engine block, but when I searched "engine block heater" online I couldn't find anything that looks like it, and I hesitate to list it on Freecycle if I can't even put a name to it.
• An old rolling cart that had been sitting in the corner of the shed ever since we bought the place. When we dragged it out, we discovered that it was apparently meant to hold electrical appliances, because it had a crude power strip built into one side: a couple of small outlets connected to an ancient electrical cord with no grounding plug. That feature probably isn't useful anymore, but the cart itself could be, so we set it out on the curb as well. If that doesn't work, we'll try Freecycle.

Once all the junk was gone and the surfaces were clear, we could find better spots for the things we wanted to keep. Our Hudson SQ-X Squirrel Excluders, two useful but unwieldy chicken-wire constructions, found a new home on a high shelf with a couple of tarps and a spare garden hose. The PVC pipes we use to make cages for our honeyberry bushes got tucked away on a lower shelf behind some smaller pots and tools. A couple of tools that had previously sat on the floor got hung up on the wall, now that we had access to the wall to hang them.

The reorganized shed is much cleaner and airier than the cluttered space we started out with. We didn't actually get rid of that much stuff, but it all fits in much better, giving us much better access to the things we use regularly. And there's enough room left over to put away the charcoal grill and the patio chairs once winter comes.

Ironically, one thing that ended up going back into the shed was that big stack of pallets. We spent so long on the cleanup that, in the end, Brian didn't have the time or the energy to break them down. But at least they're out of the way now, tucked into the corner where that rolling cart used to be, so they're no longer impeding our movement.

The gift of less stuff

We're in the middle of a busy couple of months. Between events with Citizens' Climate Lobby (CCL), Morris dance performances, and stuff we're doing with family and friends, we don't have a single free weekend until June. And some weekends, including this one, are crammed full of events on both days. Today, I was "tabling" (staffing a table at a street fair) for CCL in the afternoon, and we're going to the opening of our local outdoor movie series tonight; tomorrow, we have a Morris performance down in South Jersey during the day and a CCL get-together in exactly the opposite direction in the evening. With all that going on, this hour before dinner is about the only time I've got to update my blog, so you're only getting a quickie post this week.

One of the things that kept us busy last weekend was Mother's Day. My mom is a difficult person to buy gifts for, because her house is so full already that she doesn't need any more stuff. On the contrary, she's always saying she wants to get rid of the stuff she has. So, last year, I had a brainwave: I offered, as my Mother's Day gift to her, to come to her house and spend the day helping her clean out one room of her choice. I didn't suggest this because she had any heavy boxes to move, nor because I thought I could do a better job than she could deciding what to throw away, what to keep, and where to put it. The main advantage of having me there all day was that it would force her to sit down and do the work of going through things, instead of wanting to do it and never finding the time. And it seemed to work pretty well. She chose her office, and by the end of the day we'd cleared away all the piles of paper in there, removed some old things of mine that had been sitting in that room since it was my bedroom, and put all her computer equipment in places where she could easily find it.

Since that was such a success, I decided to give her the same "gift" this year. This time around, she decided to get a bit more ambitious and tackle the sun porch, which is a repository of all kinds of miscellany: decades-old toys, plants and garden supplies, old sporting equipment, a big bookshelf full of board games and puzzles, and a huge stack of my old notebooks from high school and college. Mom seemed to think we could go through this stuff quickly and maybe have time to move on to another room, but I suspected we wouldn't even make a dent in the contents of the the porch itself. 

It turns out the answer was somewhere in the middle. We didn't clean out the whole porch, but we did get through a lot more of it than I expected. I spent a large portion of the day going through my old notebooks, pulling out the few things I wanted to keep (mostly stories and poems that I didn't have digital copies of), then breaking down the notebooks themselves so the contents could be recycled. I discarded so much paper that I had to split it between two separate bins so they wouldn't be too heavy for my dad to haul to the curb. But I also found time to review the contents of several bins and shelves with my mom. She opted to keep a lot more of the games and puzzles than I would have in her place, but we still set aside quite a lot of them to give away. We also cleared out things from the bins I'd had no idea were in there: a couple of giant "magic bubble wands," several old tennis rackets, a baseball bat and a few balls, multiple Frisbees, an old model airplane kit, and even an old jump rope of mine that I hadn't seen in decades.

All that stuff went downstairs into the storage room, where it will sit until Hopewell holds its next town-wide yard sale. My parents aren't planning to host an official sale, but they'll haul out a folding table, set it up on the lawn, and put out all their unwanted items with a big sign saying that everything (barring the table itself) is free. They hope that the yard-sale shoppers, always eager for a bargain, will snap up most of it, leaving them with only a few items to either Freecycle or discard.

All in all, I'd say this was a pretty ecofrugal present. It was something my mom actually wanted, and it cost nothing and used no natural resources to produce. Better still, it helped get all this unwanted stuff out of the house and, hopefully, into the homes of people who can use it—people who might otherwise have spent their own money, and the planet's resources, on new products. In fact, it worked so well I'm thinking of offering the same gift to my dad for Father's Day next month. (That will result in one more rather full weekend in June, but at least it will be only one weekend out of an otherwise quiet month.)

A completed birthday project (and one to come)

Last January, I asked Brian for my most ambitious DIY birthday gift ever: cleaning up our unfinished workshop/laundry room/storage room. I wanted to get rid of all the unnecessary stuff, neatly organize the stuff that remained, and most importantly, cover up the bare insulation that currently served as the wall surface. I knew at the time I asked that this was a big project that might take up to half a year to finish. But as it turns out, that was a serious underestimate. 

It took us a couple of months just to get around to the first stage of the project. In March, we went through all the stuff in the room and identified several things we didn't need: a junker bike we'd picked up off the curb, loads of other bike parts, my unused guitar case, a hanging-file box, a big box full of brown glass bottles that we'd picked up for free at a yard sale and used only a few of, a box of wooden blocks, and a packing tape dispenser. We donated all the bike stuff to the New Brunswick Bike Exchange and disposed of the rest without difficulty on Freecycle. 

After that, we couldn't get started on covering the walls until we'd bought the necessary lumber. But since it came in large sheets and our little Honda couldn't possibly hold more than one, this step required renting a truck. We finally got around to doing that in June, when we were able to use the same truck to pick up a new patio set from Craigslist (along with the lumber for Brian's planter project). The year was more than half over before we actually got the boards cut to size and up onto the walls (first flipping around the batts of insulation so that the moisture barrier was properly positioned on the outside, facing toward the heated space). And it took us all the way until my next birthday—and just a little bit longer—to complete the job of tidying and reorganizing the stuff that remained.

But tidy it we did, and I'm ready at last to unveil the final result. First, as a reminder of what we were up against, here's the "before" picture of the room as it looked when I asked for this present a year ago. 

And here's the "after," as seen from roughly the same angle.

The lighting is still terrible for photography, but everything else is so much better. The two remaining bikes are both neatly hung from the ceiling, the boxes are all neatly stowed on the shelves, the work table has been cleared off, and all the tools have been arranged so that they're visible and easy to access.

Here it is from another angle: the before...

...and the after. In this shot, you can see the neat reorganization of the shelves, the workbench (which has a usable surface for the first time in years) and, most of all, the scrap wood pile. It's now all neatly tucked into the back corner, arranged by size, rather than spilling out onto the floor.

 

Let's come in for a couple of close-ups. Here's one of the wall nearest the door, with its nice new wood covering. In addition to hiding away the insulation, the OSB wood panels make a suitable spot for hanging things. We put up a little hook to hold our clothespin bag (my old purse) and hung up the extra sections of our shoe rack to provide convenient, accessible storage for safety gear and extension cords. This also had the advantage of getting them out of their storage box so we could throw it away, freeing up more shelf space.

And here's a look at our reorganized tool storage. We already had that pegboard and most of the hooks; it was just a matter of arranging them optimally to display most of our tools. The few that don't fit are either tucked in a toolbox or neatly laid out on the cabinet below. (We did buy a few extra tool hooks, but they cost less than $15 total.)

The one problem with this new layout is that I can't quite reach the top row of tools on the board. But Brian addressed that with one more DIY piece, completed just today: a little step stool made out of scrap lumber. (He realized after completing it that the supports were placed too far in, so he added markings to indicate where I could step on it without tipping it over. But he'll probably take it apart and reassemble it at some point.)

Here's one last area that I didn't manage to get a good "before" picture of: the floating shelf over the utility sink. Previously, this shelf was a piece of MDF that was seriously bowed under the weight of all the various detergents and cleaning tools piled on it. Now it's a smaller piece of leftover plywood that neatly holds a pared-down assortment of cleaning supplies we'll actually use.

So how much did the project cost in total? Well, it depends on how you count. We spent $244.56 on lumber at Home Depot, but about half of that was for the planter project, so that's only about $125 for the walls. Add the $15 or so we spent on tool-hanging hardware, and that's around $140 worth of supplies. But if you include the $102 we spent on the U-Haul to get all that lumber home, that brings the total cost to around $242—still less than the cost of the closet doors that were my 2016 birthday present, but not by much. And in terms of time and elbow grease, this project was probably at least as demanding.

After this complicated project, I'm hoping my birthday request for this year will be a lot easier to fulfill. Over the years, the grout in our shower has become increasingly stained, despite my best efforts to keep it clean. Also, bits of it have fallen out, leaving deeper gaps between the tiles, which makes the stains even harder to remove. So, for this year, I've asked to redo all the grout, then seal it so that it will stay put and stay clean. We've done this job once before, so we know we can handle it, but last time we neglected the sealing step. I'm hoping that with a good sealant, we can keep the grout clean and intact for at least a few years, and when it starts to wear off, we can just reapply the sealant instead of having to replace all the grout. I've already invested in a bottle of Aqua-X Grout Sealer, which got good reviews from several professional review sites (including this professional tiler). Now all we need is a tub of grout and—always the tricky part—a free weekend to apply it.

Tackling our home's worst room

The gauntlet has been thrown down. My birthday is still a few days off, but I've already given Brian notice of what home I want for my traditional DIY birthday present. And it's probably the tallest order I've ever given him, because my request is to tackle the very worst room in our house. This one.

This room has several functions. It's a laundry room, a workshop, an overflow pantry, and a storage room for a vast assortment of stuff, including:

• Two and a half bicycles (two complete ones and parts of a third)
• A dozen folding chairs
• A 50-pound sack of birdseed
• Two ladders
• Two fire extinguishers
• 30 gallons of water stored up for emergencies
  
• Our entire CD collection (serving as backup for the digital files we actually listen to)
• My old boom box and cassette tapes, which tend to get used only during power outages
  
• Numerous power tools, including a miter saw, an air compressor, and a wet-dry vacuum
• Assorted containers of paint, stain, glues, and solvents
  
• A sleeping bag
• My seldom-used guitar's even more seldom-used case
• A large box full of equipment for starting seeds

And that's far from a complete list. With all this stuff and more crammed into a roughly 11-by-15-foot space, it's very difficult to find anything. It's also sometimes difficult, and always distasteful, to spend any time in the room. It's not heated at all, and it's lit by two cold-white tube lights (one old fluorescent and one newer LED strip). The floor is raw concrete, the ceiling has exposed joists with various wires and pipes running through, and there are two cinder block walls and two frame walls with the insulation exposed. 

I'm not expecting or even hoping to make this room into a beautiful and cozy retreat. But I do at least want it to be (a) functional and (b) not actively unpleasant to be in. My goals are:

1. To get rid of everything currently in the room that doesn't need to be there.
2. To organize the rest of the room's contents so that I know where everything is and can physically lay hands on it. If I go into the room looking for an extension cord, I don't want to have to pull every box off the shelves until I find the one labeled "wires and cables." (Oh yeah, that's another thing in the room that wasn't on the list above.)
3. To cover up the insulation with something. It doesn't have to be a nicely plastered and painted wall. A sheet of OSB plywood would be sufficient, and certainly preferable to what's there now.
4. To have the room look at least reasonably tidy. I know it's probably still going to be cluttered, but I'd like the clutter to be more neatly organized. At the very least, I'd like to be able to walk all the way around the room without obstruction.
   

Based on our previous track record, I figure we'll be working on this for the rest of the winter and probably most of the spring. But hey, it'll keep us off the street.

The Reverse Kondo

Last week, I came face to face with a real-life example of the sunk cost fallacy, one of the cognitive biases I wrote about in my Money Crashers piece. Based on the recommendations of several YouTubers, I'd ordered a pair of jeans from Fashion Nova in the hopes that they might actually fit both my waist and my butt (despite the 12-inch difference in circumference between the two). Unfortunately, these turned out to be absolutely not what I wanted; they were skin-tight almost everywhere from my belly button down to my knees, except in the places where they bunched up oddly around the crotch.

Even more unfortunately, in my eagerness to seize on what I hoped would be the jeans of my dreams, I'd neglected to check the site's return policy. I wasn't too concerned about the cost of return shipping; the real shocker was discovering that the site doesn't offer refunds at all. The best I could do was return the pants, at my own expense, in exchange for store credit. But since the entire site is definitely aimed at much younger women who like to show a LOT more skin than I do, it was highly unlikely I'd find anything else I liked. Rather than shell out more money to send back the jeans in the almost certainly futile hope of getting something for my investment, it made more sense to write them off as a loss and give them to the local thrift shop, where they might find a new owner who could actually wear them.

Once I'd decided to give away the jeans, it occurred to me that I might as well go through the rest of my closet and see if there were any other items in there that would be put to better use on someone else's back. And while I was at it, I asked Brian if there was anything he wanted to get rid of, and he ended up trying on everything in his side of the closet and ditching a sizable percentage of it. By the time we were done, we had one big box filled to overflowing with clothes to donate, and another small bag of stuff in such crappy condition it was fit only for textile recycling. (The Repurpose NJ boxes we've used in the past are no longer available, but it turns out they offer textile recycling at H&M stores, and maybe they'll have some jeans that fit me.)

Now, if we'd been following the principles of the highly trendy Marie Kondo as we went through this exercise, we'd have needed a much bigger giveaway box. In fact, we'd probably have ended up with almost nothing left in our closets. Her standard is that the only items you should have in your closet are those that "spark joy" in your heart when you touch them, which seems to me like an awfully high bar. I mean, I wouldn't say any single pair of underpants I own sparks joy for me, but I know I'd miss them if they weren't there.

So instead, we hit on a standard you might call the Reverse Kondo. (The Odnok, if you will.) We weren't going to insist that our clothes spark joy, but at the very least, they shouldn't spark annoyance. Any item that we felt bad about every time we saw it in the closet, for any reason—guilt, frustration, disappointment, regret, whatever—had to go.

Using this standard, we discarded:

• Clothes that were either way too big or way too small
• Clothes we'd both received as gifts and never worn
• A couple of sweaters I bought because I loved their bright colors, but never wore because they made me look like a fuzzy beach ball
• A skirt that I used to wear a lot, but no longer felt enthusiastic about
• A couple of wool neckties Brian had inherited from his grandfather and never worn (on the maybe two occasions per year when he actually wears a tie, he prefers a silk one)
• Items that we never wore because they were duplicates of other items we liked better (like Brian's less-favorite pair of beige pants)
• Most difficult of all, but necessary: a dress I'd bought as my all-purpose, go-to dress for any kind of slightly dressy occasion in warm weather. I had, in fact, worn it at least once, so I knew it was useful—but I had to face the fact that I'd never really liked it. I felt unsure about getting rid of something that fit perfectly and was still serving a purpose, but I knew I'd never actually be happy wearing it, and that seemed like the polar opposite of sparking joy.

However, under the same standard, we kept:

• A few pairs of pants that Brian wore only occasionally
• Another couple of sweaters that were fairly shapeless, but so warm that on cold days, I was willing to wear them anyway
• A dress that I hadn't worn in years and didn't consider very practical, but that caused Brian to go "Hubba hubba!" when I tried it on

In short, anything that there was a reasonable chance we would miss when it was gone is staying in the closet. Anything we will never notice the lack of—or feel actively relieved to see gone—is going to a new home. And our closet will be less crowded, but will still contain enough clothes to meet our everyday needs, and our less everyday ones as well.

DIY desk dingus

When I upgraded my computer a few weeks ago, the one piece of software that I had to ditch completely was the pair of apps that came with my camera. I can't say I was really sorry to see them go, because they'd always been incredibly clunky to use; you had to plug in the camera and use one piece of software to download all the pictures from it, then close that and open a different piece of software to view the pics, and then manually copy the files from that program and paste them into the folder on my hard drive where I keep images for uploading to this blog. The whole system was one big ugly kludge, but I put up with it because it was the only way I had of getting the images off the camera and onto the computer.

With my new OS, however, the software no longer worked, and the camera was so old that no upgrades were available for it. So after some experimenting, we concluded that the best way to get the pictures off the camera would be to buy a little microSD card reader that I could just pop the camera's card into directly. That only cost about 15 bucks at NewEgg.com.

This setup worked fine, and it was a lot easier to use than the old system, but it made my desk a bit cluttered. I had the little Mac mini itself sitting next to the monitor, a USB hub plugged into that (for the camera and various other peripherals that are used only occasionally, such as a webcam), an external hard drive, a pair of speakers, and a power strip that holds the plug for my monitor and the charger for the camera battery. The little gadgets all stuck out at odd angles, and the various cords that connected them looked exactly like chew toys to our cats.

I searched Staples and other office supply sites for an organizer to corral all these little gadgets, but I couldn't find anything suitable, so Brian generously offered to custom-build one for me. First, he constructed a simple stand out of scrap wood that would fit over the top of the Mini.

This would hold the USB hub and the card reader side by side, with the cord from the card reader plugged into the back of the hub and the cord for the hub extending out the back and down to the power strip below.

To plug the card reader into the hub, he had to raise it up to the same level, so he added a block for the card reader to sit on. He added two little blocks in the back to hold it in place. Then, to hold the hub in place next to it, he cut a wooden frame to fit snugly around the back of the hub.

He glued the block and the frame to the bottom of the stand. With those in place, both peripherals would stay fixed in position and aligned with the front of the stand.

Once that was done, he added a top piece. He glued the wooden frame for the USB hub to the top as well as the bottom to keep it extra secure. (The card reader wasn't completely snug against the top of the stand, so he shimmed it up with a piece of cardboard cut from a raisin bran box.)

At this point, the stand did everything it really needed to do, but he went the extra mile to make it look nice. First, he stained the outside with some leftover stain in a dark color. (I believe it's "Rosewood," the shade we used on our living-room futon frame.)

Then, he made a face plate for it out of some thin wood, and stained that piece to match.

Then came the hard part: cutting the holes in the face plate for the slots of the hub and the card reader. He measured carefully to get the positions exactly right and traced their outlines onto the wood. Then he cut around the outlines with an Exact-o knife and used a woodworking tool to scrape away the plywood from the middle. It wasn't the most elegant way to do the job, but it worked.

He wanted the face plate to be screwed on rather than glued, so it could be removed to pull the peripherals out if necessary. Initially, he used a pair of wood screws, but their bright steel heads clashed with the dark finish, so he ended up replacing them with darker-colored drywall screws. 

The finished stand sits next to my desk and keeps everything neatly contained. The hub and the card reader are tucked inside the stand, the power strip sits neatly next to it, and the external hard drive rests on top.

The best part, from my ecofrugal standpoint, is that the whole gadget was made from materials we had on hand: scrap wood, stain, screws, and glue. So while he invested a fair amount of time in building it, he didn't spend a penny on materials. And this free, handmade contraption does a much better job containing the clutter on my desk than any fancy organizer the tech world has to offer.

A time of renewal

Last Monday was Rosh Hashanah, the start of the Jewish year. It's a time for reflecting on what was good and bad about the past year and what you'd like to change in the year to come. There's even a ritual called Tashlich, in which you toss bread crumbs into a river or lake to symbolize casting off your sins—or, if you're a more modern type of Jew, your personal shortcomings—so you can start the new year with a clean slate.

Well, I didn't go to any actual services this year, but I have been spending this past week cleaning up my life in a variety of ways. For starters, last weekend I finally took the plunge and decided to upgrade my computer. Ever since I got this computer five years ago, I've been using the same OS it came with, Snow Leopard (MacOS 10.6), never daring to upgrade because I feared that a new version of OSX would break all my software. Before I got this refurbished model, I'd tried a new one running Lion, or 10.7, and it was so impossible to work with that I decided I was just going to stick with what I had as long as it still worked.

However, for several months now, I've been seeing signs that "as long as it still worked" wasn't going to last much longer. Various websites started warning me that they would no longer work with my current browsers (I use both Firefox and Chrome), and I couldn't upgrade the browsers without upgrading the OS. Then the browsers themselves started popping up warning messages saying they were "no longer supported." Wordpress, the online editor I use with one of my clients, took to crashing unpredictably; without warning, my work would disappear and Chrome would pop up a message saying, "Oh snap! This page could not be loaded." Fortunately I always saved a backup copy in Word on my hard drive, since Wordpress had always been persnickety—but then Word itself started crashing when I tried to paste content from Workpress into it. I eventually realized that I was going to have to either upgrade or replace the whole machine, and I figured the upgrade would be—if it worked—the more ecofrugal option of the two.

Unfortunately, Apple came out with a brand-new OS about a week before I came to this conclusion—and this latest version, Sierra (10.12), was so advanced that I couldn't upgrade directly to it from Snow Leopard. So I had to upgrade first to the "interim version" of the previous OS, El Capitan, and then upgrade from there to Sierra. And once that was done, I had to download new versions of all my software: browsers, mail program, productivity software, and so on. The whole process took most of the weekend, but aside from the time involved, it actually went pretty smoothly; all my old documents are still readable, my old e-mails are still accessible, and my old bookmarks are still working. And the only piece of new software I actually had to pay for was the latest version of Office, which set me back about $150. (I would have just gone with the free open-source version, LibreOffice, but another of my clients requires its documents to be in Word form, and my editor there said that conversion between the two doesn't always work smoothly. So I had to spring for the paid software, but at least I can deduct it as a business expense.)

While Brian was busy fiddling with my computer, I was in the bedroom cleaning out my closet. This was another move that had been sort of brewing for a while; over the past year, I'd been pulling the odd unused item out of my wardrobe and tucking it into a bag of stuff I intended to either donate or discard—eventually. But after a while, I decided that the bag was just cluttering up the bedroom, and I should really go through my entire wardrobe properly, cull all the unwanted items, and donate the lot. So last weekend, I was in and out of the bedroom, trying on pretty much everything I own, periodically popping out to model an outfit for Brian and get a thumbs-up or thumbs-down from him before deciding.

Some of the choices were difficult for me because they were items I'd only bought recently. Like the velvet jacket I found at a rummage sale that was, on further examination, really too long for me—and not something I'd ever really have an occasion to wear, anyway. Or the pair of shoes I picked up at last month's town-wide yard sales after only a brief try-on, which proved, after more extensive wear, to be uncomfortably snug. If I decided to give these items away, it would be like throwing away the money I'd spent on them—which is something I just hate to do, even if it's only three bucks. But looking at it rationally, I was forced to conclude that there was no way I was going to get my money's worth out of these items by keeping them unused in my closet; they'd just be taking up space that could go to clothes I would actually wear and enjoy.

So item by item, the pile of clothing on my bed grew: pants I'd bought online that had never really fit me properly, too-long sweaters, oversized shirts. I refused to be swayed by sentiment: gifts from my late grandmother and the dress I wore to my sister's wedding were not spared the axe. The one exception was a long-sleeved shirt I've had for years, which I always loved because it looked so good on me, but which has now worn out to the point that the sleeves just develop new holes the minute I stitch up the old ones. So I merely cut the sleeves off that one, and I'm planning to try stitching up the armholes so I can continue to wear it at least a little while longer as a tank top.

Aside from that one item, all the clothes got sorted out into three piles. Items in good condition that I thought might look good on my friends or relatives were set aside to be offered to them the next time I see them. Items in good condition that were the wrong size for everyone I know went into a big box to be picked up by the war veterans' association. And items that weren't fit for anyone to wear went into a small bag to be dumped in the nearest textile recycling box. (It's a couple of miles from our house, but less than a mile from the H-Mart, so we just made a small detour to drop off the items on our latest grocery run.)

And while we were at it, Brian and I took the opportunity to do the "recycling rounds" of our town as well and get rid of some other hard-to-recycle items that had been accumulating in our house. We took a big batch of cereal-box liners, along with a couple of toothpaste tubes and deodorant canisters, to the Terracycle bin at the Reformed Church, then deposited a collection of plastic bags in the bag bin at the local Stop & Shop.

So, as the new year begins, our waste receptacles are empty, my computer is functioning, and my closet has been stripped down to the stuff that actually fits and is useful to me. I know, of course, that this situation won't last forever. The bins will fill up again; new "improvements" to software and websites will inevitably slow my computer down again; and the items in my closet will wear out or become less useful as my shape and/or my lifestyle change. But for the time being, at least, my year is off to a fresh start.

The problem of too much space

Over our Christmas vacation, we discovered a new show on HGTV called "Tiny House Hunters." In a refreshing change of pace from the original "House Hunters" series (and its two existing spin-offs, "House Hunters International" and "Island Hunters"), the prospective homeowners on this show are seeking less space, not more. They have various reasons for wanting to downsize: some are trying to live debt-free in a house they can buy for cash, some live a nomadic lifestyle and want a home they can take with them, and some are just trying to tread more lightly on the earth. Whatever the reason, they're bucking the long-term American trend against seeking more, more, more, by scaling back their belongings until they can fit into a home that, in many cases, is smaller than the kitchen at their old house.

As it turns out, this isn't the only show about the Tiny House movement. While trying to find out the schedule for "Tiny House Hunters," I Googled "tiny house show" and discovered two others: "Tiny House Builders," also on HGTV, which is all about the construction of these space-saving dwellings, and "Tiny House Nation," on FYI, which is like a combination of the other two: each hour-long episode shows both the process of constructing a tiny house to meet a family's needs and the process the family goes through to adjust to living there. Apparently, Tiny Houses are a pretty hot topic right now, and everybody wants a piece of it—which is an encouraging sign for a society in which the average new house is a whopping 2,600 square feet. (According to the environmental site Shrink that Footprint, Americans have more than twice as much space per person in their homes as the Brits and Japanese, and more than 3 times as much as Russians.)

Brian and I have now watched two episodes of "Tiny House Hunters" and two episodes of "Tiny House Nation" (which has full-length episodes available on its website and on Hulu). And after viewing two of them in a row last night, we've made an astonishing discovery: our house is HUGE.

Now, we've always known that our roughly 1,400-square-foot home (936 square feet upstairs and roughly half as much finished area downstairs) was a lot more house than we needed for just the two of us. We certainly could have made do with significantly less, if there had been any smaller houses on the market in the areas we wanted. But still, we've always been accustomed to think of our house as fairly modest in size. After all, it's only about half the size of the average new American home; it's smaller than most of the houses in our town, and even in our neighborhood; and there are a lot of rooms it doesn't have, such as a separate dining room or a formal living room. Yet after watching two episodes in a row of "Tiny House Nation" last night, Brian and I found ourselves wandering around the house saying, "Look at all this wasted space!" The designers on this show put Karl Champley of "Wasted Spaces" to shame, using every single square inch of space—walls, floor, and ceiling—and often putting the same space to multiple uses. In just two episodes, we saw a kitchen with individual induction burners that can be stored in a drawer and pulled out when needed, an entire office that folds up into a movable wall, and a Murphy-style bed that folds up into the wall—and then has a fold-out seating bench on the back.

This raises another question: if our house has so much room, why do we always seem to have so much trouble each year figuring out where to put all our Christmas presents? This year, for instance, Brian got a new air compressor—a small one, but it's still bigger than a breadbox, and it needs to find a new home in the shop, which is already piled so deep in stuff that it's hard to move around or find an empty surface to put anything down (or, once you've put it down, find it to pick it up again when you need it). Even if our house is small by modern standards, it's still got around 700 square feet of space for each of us; why can't we seem to find two square feet to store Brian's new toy?

At first, it's a puzzling question. But the answer actually became obvious to me while I was looking for a place to put one of my presents, a set of fluffy new bath towels. I opened up the cabinet in the downstairs bathroom and thought, "Gee, we have so many towels in here already, how are the new ones going to fit?" So I started pulling out the old towels, most of which hadn't actually been used in years, and that was when it hit me: We can't find room for anything because we have TOO MUCH space.

Yes, this sounds completely counterintuitive. But just think about it for a minute: when you live in a small space, you can't afford to hold on to things you don't need. You need to make the most of every available square inch, so anything that isn't being used has to go to free up space for more important stuff. But when you have extra space, it's easy to let things pile up. I didn't need all those extra towels; they aren't being used, and chances are they never will be used again. But on the other hand, there was no particular reason to get rid of them either, because we had the space. As long as that cabinet was sitting there, there was no reason not to hold on to all our old towels and whatever other miscellaneous linens we could find. There were curtains in there that hadn't been hung since we moved into this house; there were curtains that we'd never hung in any home and couldn't even remember where they came from; there were old shower curtain liners that were stained and had been retired in favor of new ones. But we hadn't dumped any of this stuff, because there was no need to—and consequently, when some nice, new towels that we might actually use came into our life, there was no room for them.

I don't mean to imply by this that I think Brian and I would actually be happier if we traded in our roomy, paid-off house for one less than half its size. After all, a house with more space has certain advantages, such as...well, more space. Sure, this house has more room than we actually need or use on a day-to-day basis, but if the plumbing unexpectedly goes out at my parents' house over Thanksgiving weekend, we can just pack up four guests and settle them in at our place with no difficulties. And when the Folk Project calls around seeking volunteers to host its monthly Home-Made Music Party, which can have anywhere from half a dozen people to over fifty, we can say without hesitation that we have plenty of room to put a big circle of musicians downstairs, fit in a smaller one (or two) upstairs, and still have room for folks to chat over snacks in the kitchen without disrupting the music. No Tiny House is going to be able to pull that off.

So I don't actually want to reduce the amount of space in our house; what I would like to do, instead, is stop using all of it. Because even if we do, technically, have room to store piles of linens that we never use, or repair records for a car that was totaled four years ago, or three old pairs of tap shoes that my sister and I used in high school, having these things in our home doesn't actually make our lives better in any way. They're just filling up space—which then isn't available for stuff that we could actually use.

So the first of my New Year's Resolutions this year is to go through every room in this house—every single room—and remove everything that is just taking up space. Stuff that could still be useful for someone else can be Freecycled; stuff that's worn or damaged, or that no one else wants, can go to the textile recycling bins. And stuff that's absolutely no use to anyone can just be thrown out—because while I normally like to avoid waste as much as possible, keeping garbage cluttering up my house instead of cluttering up a landfill isn't a solution. It's still garbage, it's just in the wrong place.

I'll keep you posted throughout the year on our decluttering efforts. I'm thinking of keeping a list of all the items I get rid of and how, updating it throughout the year to track our progress. By the end of 2015, I'll have concrete evidence of how much useless stuff I've sent on to a better life—and I'll also know just where I have available space for next year's holiday gifts.

Ecofrugal Living podcast #4: The 45-minute rule

Here's the latest Ecofrugal Living podcast, based on the blog entry for June 5, 2014.


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

The 45-minute rule

Recently, the Live Like a Mensch blog ran an article on how to decide whether the stuff you own is really worth keeping. In it, the blogger cited another article she'd seen at a site called Money After Graduation, which claimed that there is no need to own anything unless you use it for at least 45 minutes every day. I looked at that sentence, and my mind absolutely boggled. Forty-five minutes a day? The blogger concedes that it doesn't have to be 45 minutes every day; it could be, for instance, 5.25 hours per week or 11 days per year. But she maintains that unless your usage averages out to 45 minutes per day, "it's probably cheaper to borrow or rent it."

I started thinking about the things I use every day. The first one that came to mind was my toaster oven, which I use every morning to make breakfast. But this only takes about two minutes, so according to this blogger, I don't use the toaster oven enough to justify owning it. Well, okay, but what exactly would she recommend I should do instead? Rent a toaster? How could that possibly be cheaper than owning a secondhand toaster oven we inherited from Brian's granddad? Does she think I should make my toast on a toasting fork, the way we do when the power goes out? That would be a lot more work, but it probably still wouldn't take more than 5 minutes—so I guess by her argument, I just shouldn't eat toast. If it doesn't take 45 minutes per day to do, it's not worth doing.

The same thinking applies to most of the things I use every day. My microwave? I use that twice a day, for my cocoa in the morning and for my popcorn in the afternoon, but still, that's comes to less than 6 minutes per day total. Not good enough! Out with it! What about my toothbrush? I use that for two minutes every morning and two minutes every evening. Well under 45 minutes, so it must not be worth owning. In fact, under her guidelines, pretty much my entire bathroom would have to go, since I don't spend 45 minutes a day bathing or washing my hands or sitting on the toilet—even though I do all these things every day, most of them multiple times per day. But no matter. Less than 45 minutes of daily use = not worth owning.

Then there are the things we use for 45 minutes on some days, but not every day. Brian's bike, for instance. On the days he bikes to work, it takes him 25 minutes each way, so that meets the 45-minute rule—but he doesn't bike to work on weekends, or when it's raining, or when the temperature is below freezing. So, apparently, the bike that I made such a convincing argument for in last Friday's post is just a waste of space. And then there's our charcoal grill. We got it for free (picked up from a neighbor who was dumping it) and we use it at least a couple of times each month in the summer, but we can't use it every day even in the summer, and we can't use it at all in the winter. So, sorry, no summer grilling pleasures for us.

I could probably go on like this all day, but I think by now I've given more than enough examples to make my point: the 45-minute rule is rubbish. Completely useless. But the point it's trying in its crude way to address is still a valid one: many, if not most of us, have stuff in our homes that we seldom, if ever, use. So exactly how much use does an item need to get to make it worth owning?

The first question to consider is, what's the downside of owning any item? In most cases, there are two: money and space. Most things you can own cost money to buy, and some also cost money to own, whether you're using them or not. A car, for example, even if it's only driven 100 miles every year, costs money to insure and to keep in drivable condition so that it'll be ready to go on the rare occasions that you need it. And most things you can own take up space: anywhere from a square inch for a bottle of nail polish to a whole room for a pool table. So to be worth owning, an item has to earn its keep in both money and space.

This leads to one conclusion right away: the rules for items you already own are different from the rules for new purchases. When you're deciding whether to buy something, you have to consider both cost and space, but when you're deciding whether to keep your existing belongings or get rid of them, space is the only factor.

For buying decisions, I think the crucial question to ask is, "Will I get my money's worth out of this?" For small purchases, like a $2 thrift-shop shirt, it's easy to justify the expense even if you only expect to use the item half a dozen times. By contrast, if you're thinking about buying something really big, like a car, it's clearly worth it only if you're going to drive it on a regular basis. The 45-minute rule, in fact, is probably appropriate in this case, because cars are one of the few items you can realistically choose to rent rather than buy for occasional use. If you just want something to take on road trips two or three times a year, renting a car for 25 bucks a day is sure to work out cheaper than dropping 15 grand (plus insurance, plus maintenance) on a new one. So I guess the 45-minute rule does have some use, after all: it's helpful for deciding whether to rent or own.

For deciding whether to keep what you already own, a couple of the comments on the Money After Graduation post proposed a guideline called the 6-month rule: if you haven't used an item in the last 6 months and don't expect to use it in the next 6 months, you don't really need it. This definitely seems like a more useful rule of thumb than the 45-minute rule, especially for things like special-occasion clothing. For most clothing, the 11-day variant of the 45-minute rule works pretty well: if it doesn't get worn at least 11 days a year, it isn't worth the closet space. But special occasions are, by definition, special. They don't tend to happen 11 days per year, but when one does come up, you need to dress for it, and it's much easier to do that if you have one special item set aside in your wardrobe for that purpose. Brian certainly doesn't wear a suit 11 days every year, but the one suit he owns has been to every wedding, funeral, graduation, job interview, and other formal occasion he has attended in the past 15 years. It's definitely earned its keep.

I would argue, though, that even the 6-month rule needs an exception: any item that's designated for emergencies. These, I maintain, are worth having even if they never get used. For instance, we have a fire extinguisher in our kitchen, as well as a small one in the trunk of our car. We bought them both in the full hope and expectation that we'd never actually need to use them—but in the unlikely event that we do need one, we'll need it right away. Waiting for an actual fire before going out and buying one is not a reasonable strategy.

And if you're using it for 45 minutes every day, something is definitely wrong.

Spring cleaning

Brian and I spent most of yesterday cleaning out our storage room (also known as the shop and the laundry room, but it does those jobs only occasionally and stores stuff 24/7). This time I remembered to take a "before" picture:

As you can see, the most obvious pile of clutter in the room is that mass of stuff on the worktable in the middle, most of which is seed-starting supplies that never got put away after we finished potting up all our seedlings for the year. So we started by going through that lot, emptying soil out of tubes, washing the tubes, discarding the more battered cartons, and neatly stacking the clean cartons in a big box marked "seed starting." The seeds themselves stayed out, since there are still several crops that have to go into the garden, but everything else was neatly contained in that box or thrown out. That made a pretty visible improvement right away.

After that, we moved on to tackling some clutter that was less visible, but just as unnecessary. For instance, I had two big bins full of scrap fabric, mostly old pairs of pants, and I had to go through all of that and admit that, realistically, it was pretty unlikely I'd ever use most of it. I still ended up keeping probably more than we needed (I doubt I'm actually going to need six pairs of old jeans just to make patches for newer jeans, for instance), but I still filled up two garbage bags with stuff to take to the  nearest textile recycling bin. I also made a smaller pile of still-usable clothing that can be donated to our local thrift shop. My scrap bin doesn't actually look all that different without the extra junk piled in and on it, but it's a lot easier to open and close.

Meanwhile, Brian was going through piles of other junk. We puzzled for a while over an assortment of electronic debris, trying to figure out what was e-waste we should recycle and what was just regular trash. We eventually decided we could safely trash all the cables, leaving just one small webcam and one old RF modulator to be taken to down to our local Department of Public Works for e-cycling. 

We also had a large box on one shelf marked "give away," full of random stuff that we can't use but still think might be useful to someone else. However, after my recent Freecycle blast, a lot of the larger items were gone, so we were able to consolidate the remainder into a much smaller box. I also pulled a couple of the items out to list them on Freecycle, as well as a few smaller things that we decided it would be amusing to stuff into Christmas stockings. (This also prompted me to get started on this year's holiday gift list, which we generally work on throughout the year as we pick up yard-sale finds and other bargains that come to hand.)

A lot of the remaining work was just tidying up: putting away tools, grouping items to be repaired on a designated "project" shelf, dumping out the accumulated sawdust and wood shavings from earlier woodworking projects, and vacuuming up all the dirt from our seed-starting ventures. Miscellaneous junk got dumped into trash bins (dried-up paint, packing foam) and bundled up for recycling (lots of corrugated cardboard). And after lots of trips upstairs and downstairs and out to the shed, here's what we had at the end of the day:

Doesn't actually look all that different from the "before" picture, does it? Hard to believe that we filled two big garbage cans with trash, two big trash bags with recyclable textiles, and two smaller bags with other items to be recycled, and yet somehow there seems to be just as much stuff in the room as there was before. But trust me, everything is much neater on the inside. At least, I now think that if I went down there looking for, say, a hammer, I could actually locate it within five minutes, which I didn't feel at all confident about before. 

How to recycle everything (if you can)

In yesterday's post on Live Like a Mensch, the blogger was lamenting about how she can never bring herself to throw away things that she thinks it should be possible to reuse or recycle. She wished she could find some "clear instructions" about when and how to reuse and recycle things, and when just tossing them in the trash is the best option. So, in an attempt to be helpful, I Googled "How to Recycle Everything" and, ba-da-bing, up came this article from Real Simple. (They've got it split across 7 separate pages, with no guide words to show which page covers which item, so scrolling through to find the specific item you want can be a pain. However, if you click the "print" icon you can get the whole thing on a single page.)

A lot of the guidelines in this article were ones I already knew about, but I did come across a few that were new to me. In other cases, by contrast, I happened to know about some recycling options that Real Simple didn't mention. So here's a selection of the most useful tips I found in the article, as well as those it left out:

• Backpacks. The article provides a link to the American Birding Association, which accepts donations of old backpacks for use on bird-watching expeditions. This was a new one on me (though probably not that useful for us, since we usually throw out backpacks only when one or both straps have given way and can no longer be patched with duct tape).
• Batteries. The article mentions RadioShack and Office Depot as places to recycle rechargeable batteries (presumably those that will no longer hold a charge), but it doesn't mention alkaline batteries. Until a few years ago, our town had a big canister at Borough Hall where you could dump these for recycling; then they got rid of it and told people to just throw them in the trash. However, there is a site, search.earth911.com, where you can punch in your zip code and find places near you for recycling alkaline batteries (and a host of other items). In our area, I found several reclamation centers in nearby towns, but they're only open to residents of those towns. So I guess it's still the trash for us. But you might fare better.
• Books. The article talks about how to recycle them, but what it doesn't say is that it's obviously better to reuse books if they're still in readable condition, and there are loads of places to donate them. Used-book stores may be particular about what they'll accept, but libraries holding book sales will usually take anything (in our town, anything that doesn't sell is offered up for free, and presumably whatever is still left gets discarded). Also, in our town, the local Lions' Club now has collection bins where books can be dropped off for use in its literacy program.
• Cell phones. The article names a couple of organizations that will take these, but one of the links no longer works and the other has no useful information. Moreover, the article doesn't mention what I would consider the easiest option for reusing an old cell phone: the drop-off bins at stores like Staples, Office Depot and Best Buy (so you can buy a new cell phone and immediately dump the old one). This site has links to several stores that collect phones. (Another point not noted in the article: make sure you delete your old address book and any other personal information before discarding the phone.)
• Computers. Our local Department of Public Works collects computers and other electronic equipment for recycling. Yours may do the same, in which case taking it to them is probably easier than sending it back to the manufacturer. Of course, donating a still-working computer to someone who can use it is a still better option, and I've found that even pretty old machines will find takers on Freecycle. (Once again, clear out the hard drive of all your personal info first.)
• Crayons! Did you know you can recycle crayons? I'd heard of a way to melt down a bunch of different broken bits in a muffin tin to make a "scribble cookie," but collecting a bunch of same-colored crayons and processing them into new crayons is an even better idea. 
• Envelopes. I was very pleased to learn that it is not, as I thought, necessary to rip the plastic windows out of junk-mail envelopes before tossing them in the bin. According to the article, "The filters will sieve out the plastic, and they’ll even take out the glue strip on the envelope flaps." That's about five minutes out of every day I can now put to more productive use. However, I was disgruntled to read that yellow mailing envelopes are not, as I thought, recyclable, because the dye won't come out. I guess I can now justify my tendency to reuse these whenever possible by pasting a new label over the old address as part of my efforts to save the earth, rather than just being a cheapskate.
• Eyeglasses. This is another item the Lions Club collects for reuse. You can find info about it on their website, but I found the search function didn't work very well: a search on the name of my town, and another on my county, turned up nothing, yet I know there are two drop boxes within walking distance of my house.
• Gift cards. (These are listed under "fake plastic credit cards," the kind credit-card issuers are always mailing you to try and lure you into signing up.) The article says there's no way to recycle these, but there is a company called EarthWorks that says it will take them. However, they insist that you sign up for their mailing list first, so I haven't tried it yet. I'll probably take the plunge when I finally conclude that I'm never going to reuse the small but growing stack of cards gathering dust in my office.
• Mattresses. The article says that search.earth911.com can provide recycling options for these as well. If we'd known that, our old mattress might not have ended up at the curb last year. (Then again, it might have, since I don't think we could have hauled it ourselves and we probably wouldn't have been willing to pay a fee to College Hunks Hauling Junk, funny as that would have been.)
• Paint. The article mentions paint recycling programs (again, you can search earth911.com to find them), but unopened cans can also be donated to a Habitat Restore if you can't return them.
• Printer cartridges. The article says you can return them to Staples for refilling, but a much more ecofrugal option is to refill them yourself. When we bought our old HP Deskjet, we bought a large bottle of black refill ink and a colored refill kit. Both items paid for themselves with the first refill, and the black ink actually lasted longer than the printer did. (Note that after refilling, you may have to trick your printer into treating the refilled cartridge as a new one. This site explains how to do it for HP printers, and it sells a little device that can be used to reset Epson printers.)
• Sneakers. The article mentions Nike's Reuse-a-Shoe program, but for us, a much easier option is the textile recycling bins run by Repurpose New Jersey. The one that was actually within walking distance of our house seems to be gone now, but there are still several in striking distance. I found these by Googling "textile recycling New Jersey"; a similar search might turn up something good for you.
• Utensils, plastic. The site says that they aren't recyclable, but it doesn't mention that you can, duh, wash them and reuse them. (Side note: don't waste your money on the kind that are made from allegedly biodegradable plant-based plastic. According to the blog My Plastic-Free Life, these things won't really break down even in a commercial composting facility, let alone in your little backyard bin.)
• Videotapes. Yes, there are ways to get rid of these—but you have to pay for shipping yourself. Considering their bulk, it probably isn't worth it. If you've hung on to your old VCR, you can continue to watch them; if not, you can give them to someone else who has. And if he doesn't want them, oh, just throw the darn things out.

The Resource Equation

A recent post on one of the Dollar Stretcher blogs profiled a couple with different approaches to frugality: a compulsively tidy wife who is always trying to get rid of clutter, and a packrat husband who holds on to all kinds of things "just in case." The wife was forced to admit that her husband's approach had its benefits after one of her new car tires was pierced by a large chunk of gravel, damaging it beyond repair, and he produced the old tire from the garage as a replacement. This led her to wonder:

who is more frugal? Is it the person who doesn't have to buy things twice as they know where they have put it, who doesn't waste time searching for things, who doesn't need more room to store more stuff? Or is it the person who can nip into the garage and find a whatsit that will perfectly fix the whatchamacallit instead of the proper part, which costs megabucks?

This reminded me of a similar situation described by Amy Dacyczyn, the "Frugal Zealot," in her Tightwad Gazette newsletter (no longer published, but archived in book form as The Complete Tightwad Gazette). In an article called "The Frugal Balance," she noted that many people consider some aspects of the frugal lifestyle to be "too extreme" for them. A typical comment, she said, might be:

"Yeah, my sister Thelma is really frugal. You can't move in her house because of all the bread bags, Styrofoam meat trays, rubber bands, and toilet-paper tubes. But I just can't live that way. I guess I'm not the tightwad type."

Amy's response was that this isn't a case of being "too frugal": rather, it's frugality out of balance. Thelma is concentrating on saving just one resource–money–by keeping this huge stash. But because she is not using other resources effectively, such as the space in her home, she ends up wasting time, energy, and money because she can't find things when she needs them. A truly frugal person, by contrast, will try to make the best possible use of all resources, balancing the amount of stuff stashed with the amount of space available. A tightwad who lives in a big house with lots of storage space can afford to keep more things "just in case," while one who lives in a tiny apartment must take extra care to conserve space and save only the things that are most likely to be useful. "Because we all have different amounts of money, time, space, and personal energy and different ideas about what constitutes quality of life," she writes, "we must each find our own frugal balance."

For me, striking this frugal balance means taking the environment into consideration as well. In fact, when I have a decision to make involving money, I sometimes think in terms of a "resource equation": money plus time plus effort plus natural resources. Rather than just making the choice with the lowest dollar cost, I try to consider all these variables and come up with the choice that will give me the lowest total cost. Sometimes, a single option is obviously the best choice because it lowers several variables at once: for instance, switching out my incandescent bulbs for CFLs saves both money and natural resources. In other cases, a choice raises some variables while lowering others: for instance, hanging out laundry to dry saves money and natural resources, but takes extra time and effort. I have to reckon in my mind how much that extra time and effort is worth to me to decide whether hanging out the laundry is the best choice overall. (For me, the answer is generally yes in summer and no in winter.) And occasionally, I'll decide that a choice that costs me more money is worth it because of the other resources it saves, such as paying a bit extra for renewable electricity through the state's "CleanPower Choice Program." (Combining this with conservation measures means that I only pay a few extra dollars a month, and when the thermometer hits 100, as it did yesterday, I can switch on the AC without guilt.)

So basically, my whole idea of ecofrugality is pretty much the same as Amy Dacycyzn's concept of the "frugal balance." The key point is that true frugality isn't just about money: it's about using all resources as wisely as possible. Interestingly, I stumbled across a quotation recently on my favorite cryptogram website that expresses much the same idea. In the words of that most venerable of all tightwads, Benjamin Franklin:

Waste neither time nor money, but make the best use of both. Without industry and frugality, nothing will do, and with them everything.